PhoneCon 2.0 is running down the track right at us, mars light flashing, whistle howling in a rising doppler shriek!!!

ding-a-ling

Where are you now?
Don’t forget the kitty litter on your way home.
Should I call out for ‘za?

That’s right biz-guys and val-gals! It’s time for PhoneCon 2.0. Since Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, this thing has grown like gangbusters! After the first PhoneCon in 2024, we vowed to do it again soonest, and I guess this was about the soonest we could do it. We weren’t sure if we should invite women, but hell… we weren’t sure if we should invite men either. We decided not to invite engineers and graphic artists, so if you see any of them in the lobby, well… they’re crashers.

Go grab yourself a PhoneCon badge for your blog… the conference planner has us on a tight schedule and it looks like we have less than eleven hours before the plenary session begins.

I understand we’re due to open with a stirring rendition of the Marseillaise performed on the fipple flute, then there will be some talking and more talking and then some talking and stuff, until finally the fat lady sings. And in this case, the fat lady is me. I’ve prepared several numbers for your edification and delight, but I’m also willing to take requests. Just hum a few bars… for the click through impaired, the agenda is reproduced below:

TENTATIVE AGENDA:

Introductions
Conclusions

BLAHAHAHA!

Okay, no, seriously, you’re in charge. But I was talking with the Co-Vice-Honorary-Capital- Advisory-President this evening, because the Chief Evangelist of the Chairman of the Bored whom I originally made this shit up with last time was ’sleep, and we came up with some ideas to kick around. Please bring your own topics.

Some Topics and Estimated Runtime:

Are you experienced? - 3o minutes
Favorite Hues - 3 hours
Wikipedia–”fixed” or free to procreate? - break out groups: 5 minutes.
What makes the web (AKA: meaning making 101) — ongoing
Frank Paynter: A song - 2 minutes
Conclusion - 30 seconds (AKA: Bye!)

Here’s what they’re saying about One Web Day…

The mission of OneWebDay is to create, maintain, advance, and promote a global day to celebrate online life: September 22, 2024

We’d like you to go to webshots.com and upload a picture that’s meaningful to you (you’ll have to register to upload, but it’s simple). Attach the keyword ‘onewebday’ (without the quote marks) to the picture.

Here’s what I think… what could it hurt? In fact, the more local our webularity becomes, the more fragmentary (and manageable) our relationships online, the nicer it is to think of setting aside a bit of time and cyberspace to acknowledge each other everywhere. I don’t know if web shots supports geotagging, but I’m going to a few different sites and tagging OneWebDay photos with locations. Flickr has good US maps, but reputedly isn’t that great world-wide. This morning I learned about another place that uses Google Earth that might therefore be better than Flickr… Panoramio.

Anyway, I’ll find a picture I can tag OneWebDay (no spaces!) load it to WebShots, then I’ll load it to a couple of geoTagging places too, just for grins.

If anybody can clue me regarding wtf “open source wireless mesh networking” might be, I’ll be tickled pinkularly. I ran into Robin Chase, a bright and intense woman who has launched one successful company (Zipcar), and who is working on another company that will knock our local social networking sox off… I haven’t received permission to write about this so I’ll be purposely and obnoxiously vague here.

But more important than the purposeful social networking product she’s building, she has a vision for integrating wireless into transportation systems using “open source mesh.” Since radio geeks are a picky bunch, I’d like to nail down the definition of “open source radio” or whatever she means. Andrew Turner has blogged a little about it here. In our conversation Robin went deeper into a discussion of toll based funding of highway infrastructure that charges variable rates by time-of-day, congestion based rates, and so forth. Is the use of “open source” just a marketing marker? Or does it refer to application level stuff like GeoRSS, or what?

I remember when the streets belonged to the people. Soon, I’m afraid, the streets will belong to those who can afford to pay the tolls.

I think that the credit card corporations can handle the whole digital identity thing. What more do we need than MBNA and Visa International, CitiCard and so forth? If you use the net to buy and sell, then these are the folks who can be your intermediaries. But we’re talking about the “real” you. So if your online identity is transparent — if your name is the same online and off, then these fine companies can handle your transactions.

Anonymity requires deeper authentication. To be anonymous and participate in web commerce will require an identity broker.

Creating a new identity through the use of a pseudonym requires a different approach.

Discuss.

It’s not about the shallow nature and the greed of the second generation brass-ring boys seeking to spin straw into gold. It’s not even so much about the immutability of the straw, although that’s a big part of it. What it’s about is the commodity nature of the widgets that the brass-ring boys seek to capitalize.

In the good old days — say 1997 — there was so much unlaundered mob money floating around in Silicon Valley that no good idea could go unfunded. Since they moved the Bank of America deeper into Christian fundamentalist country and closer to the Florida operation and the off-shore banks, there hasn’t been that much money to launder.

Of course, there are only so many drop shadow logoed, productized widgets with omitted “e”s available to fund, so the decline in drug money to launder matches the decline in products seeking funds, so the burn rates remain about the ame, although the general contribution to global warming has declined.

Most of these products are like green beans. They’re tasty with a little buttr, and you can get them anywhere, cheap. Unlike green beans though, they’re mostly based on the characteristics of a current generation of browser and a sense that the whirled wide web is the internet. It’s not, and as tele-immersion applications and the like emerge over the next few years soaking up bandwidth in ways undreamed of by the brass-ring boys, their little dreams of wealth will be dashed. Fortunately for them of course, there will remain a huge market for green beans and they’ll continue to rake a little off the top of every sale, adding value with attitude.

[This pointless little parable contains a few germs of truth, a few fantastical projections, and should be assumed to be generally meaningless, until it’s not.]

I don’t know what’s planned for One Web Day… plant a cyber-tree in cyber-space? I do know that I’ll virtually be there.

More…
… and more…
… and even more!

Okay… the extant literature about the yet to be celebrated OneWebDay is a little thin. That can be changed just by writing about it. What I plan for OneWebDay is to fire up the old Second Life account and look up some friends in that space.

I believe I have an ethical responsibility to add weight to the concern raised by Tara Hunt, Shelley, the head lemur, Jeneane and others regarding the gender imbalance in the Office 2.0 conference.

Jeneane’s rather pointed language (”fuck you Ross, fuck you Stowe”) is perhaps more passionate and direct than I’m feeling this morning, but she has a point. Meanwhile, in Tara Hunt’s comments, my friend Kathy Sierra — a woman — says “leave me out of it,” maintaining traction amongst the ditto-heads of tech.

Given the light of concern that has been shed on this particular conference, the oblivious way that the speaker list was assembled, and the absolutely clueless effort of the organizers to cash in on the conversation without adding any value to the technology, I have to echo those who suggest that everybody, but the speakers in particular and women in general, turn away from this gathering. There isn’t a lot of value addded here anyway. A few companies will lose marketing opportunities, but maybe being associated with the likes of those who would assemble a program consisting of all white males plus Kaliya (”my concerns about identity don’t extend to politics”) Hamlin is not too good for your reputation anyway?

David Clark, et al. (the ubiquitous Al, a guy who really gets around, a true multidisciplinarian) wrote a paper called “Tussle in Cyberspace: Defining Tomorrow’s Internet”.

One of the tussles that define the current Internet is the tussle of economics. The providers of the Internet are not in the business of giving service away. For most, it is a business, run to make a profit. This means they are competitors, and look at the user, and each other, as a customer and a source of revenue. Providers tussle as they compete, and consumers tussle with providers to get the service they want at a low price.

How can we, as engineers, shape the economic tussle? In fact, we have great power to shape this tussle, but first we have to understand the rules that define it. A standard business saying is that the drivers of investment are fear and greed. Greed is easy to understand—it drove hundreds of billions of dollars worth of investment in telecommunications over the last decade, much of which now [2002] sits at risk of bankruptcy. But fear is more subtle. The vector of fear is competition, which results when the consumer has choice. The tussle among providers and consumers in a competitive landscape is the most basic attribute of a marketplace. Most economists of a “western” bent would argue that competition is good: it drives innovation, disciplines the market, insures efficiency, and removes the need for intervention and regulation of a market. To make competition viable, the consumer in a market must have the ability to choose. So our principle that one should design choice into mechanism is the building block of competition.

A year later, Clark followed up with a paper that altered our understanding of end-to-end design principles. In it, he said:

Perhaps the most radical idea from this analysis is that the simple, end-to-end transparency model should be replaced with the more complex idea of controlled transparency. This implies active elements in the network, which in turn implies a tussle over who controls these devices. It also implies that we need to specify what impact these devices have on the semantics on which the applications depend on.

Subtle stuff.

(From Collin Brooke, via Barbara Ganley, via Technorati search for JP Rangaswami’s “Confused of Calcutta.“)

It’s a good post, tight enough that it’s hard to excerpt without turning it into chopped meat, but the following chunklets I found particularly appealing.

It’s easy to come off … as someone who’s already figured it all out — it’s a particularly academic attitude that’s all but hammered into us, that to “not know” is a sign of weakness….

… let’s break out the arrogance checklist for this, I was making the following assumptions:

• An idea is only good the first time, that is, if you’re the one to “discover” it.
• My ideas are so good that people will steal them.
• It’s better to be first than to write well.
• I should hoard my good ideas greedily and then spring them all at once, so that people will think my genius is pure, whole, and polished.
• “My genius” (snort)

It’s so unbelievably hard to get out of the habit of policing the borders of “my” ideas

Collin broke through his concern about creating in public and bravely opened a new site called “Rhetworks: An Introduction to the Study of Discursive Networks (& itself an experiment in networked writing).”

Conclusions

To maintain a blog, I would argue, is to participate in a small-world network, one that involves both clustering and connecting. The combination of these forces (embodied in any number of different kinds of gestures) results in a different kind of writing altogether.